You should look closely at Photo Mechanic. It's not free or OSS, but it works very, very well. It is more of a metadata manager than a photo management database - it doesn't maintain its own database; it uses your existing folder structure.

It doesn't do any retouching, but it is flexible in letting you edit (select/reject), sort, and manage metadata for tons of photos. This sounds like the sort of software you're looking for.

It's practically the standard in the news/media photography industry, and it's widely used in other pro photographers' workflows.

Floppy drives are also still used in many low-end lighting control consoles (for theatre/dance/music/entertainment) which are still widely used and even sold today. The ETC Express line is the first that comes to my mind, but there are many, many others.

The mid- and high-end controllers nowadays have USB ports, but these consoles will be around for a very long time (especially in schools, etc. where replacing [relatively] expensive pieces of equipment like this happens once every twenty years or so..)

For example, the enterprise agreement for the Adobe CS4 suite was a big deal. They spent millions purchasing the software before anyone had actually tried running any of it on an actual laptop. Only after the government had signed the contracts did they bother, only to find out that the screens were too small. All of the Adobe dialog boxes were designed for a vertical height larger than the physical screen resolution, so the OK/Cancel buttons are cut off. The workaround was to install a driver that supports a larger virtual desktop and pans the screen around. It's hideous.

My first thought when reading the story was, "unhackable...yeah, that'll last long."

My second thought was, "wait, Adobe CS4 on a netbook?!?!" To use Photoshop comfortably, I need a fast multicore processor and several gigs of RAM, not to mention a big screen. Trying to use it on my netbook would just be absolute torture.